Description

The Penance-class Cruiser is something of an enigma within the USR Navy. A rare ship, with only a few hundred in service across the entirety of space, the Penance flies in the face of USR Navy and Covenant doctrine, and represents a throwback to the earliest doctrines of independent Sangheili navies.

Regular USR and Covenant navy doctrine insists a ship must be, without question, a multipurpose platform. An excellent examples of this doctrine is the CCS-class Battlecruiser. The CCS-class is a excellent warship, escort, carrying a significant ground and air combat complement and the capability to preform orbital bombardment. The Penance however, has only one purpose; ship to ship combat.

The Penance is regarded as one of the most aggressively designed warship in the known galaxy. It lacks any kind of fighter complement, instead making up for this with an over abundance of point defence weapon systems, and it almost entirely lacks a ground combat complement, with only a single launch bay capable of carrying two Phantoms and room for just 150 warriors. However, it makes up for that by carrying an abundance of weapons. On the port and star board side, it carries three batteries of three plasma cannons, two on the lower surface, one on the upper surface. The upper and lower surfaces are also covered in Pulse LASER emitters and point defence plasma cannons, capable of creating an impressive wall of white-hot LASER fire and plasma flak. On the nose of the ship is a single Energy Projector, the Penance-class being the smallest ship to be fitted with one. This is flanked on each side by a weapon pod carrying two plasma cannons each, giving it devastating forward fire, a rarity on USR ships.

The Penance-class carries substantial armour and shielding, allowing it to shrug off impressive amounts of fire, as well as huge, protected, repulsor engines to give it a high degree of speed and agility. The ship is powered by a Pinch Fusion Reactor that is usually mounted on ships twice its length, that takes up much of the internal room, giving it the necessary power to fire almost all of its weapons at simultaneously, take sustained fire from multiple sources and move at full impulse. Thanks to quantum leaps in Sangheili computer technology, the ship is almost entirely automated, allowing for a crew a fraction of the size of other ships of similar sizes. The crew has access to relative comfort, but much of service corridors and exterior, non-occupied areas are kept at powered down status, with no artificial gravity or life support, which saves on both power, and makes it difficult for boarding actions.

Due to the single mindedness of the design, it is rarely seen in patrol actions, but is usually seen in large fleets. Quite often, during large invasions, counter attacks or fleet actions, leading the charge into the enemy fleets.

Despite being the youngest ship design in the Sangheili fleet, the Penance has already seen considerable action and garnered some degree of infamy. During the first combat deployment of a Penance-class Cruiser, it was launched in response to a Covenant raid on a trade convoy. Charging head in to a larger force consisting of two Corvettes and a Battlecruiser, it destroyed both the Corvettes in its first pass, and destroyed the Battlecruiser after a second strafing run and a sustained broadside battle. While the Covenant had inferior training, previous generation warships and poorly maintained ships, this quickly demonstrated the power of the ship.